Tag Archive for 'PP'

Distribution of planned independent requirements can be key in getting your MRP results exactly right. This post is about how to break down your Sales and Operations Plan and schedule it for MRP. E.g. Assume your SOP is planned in monthly buckets, but you plan your production in weekly buckets and you use forward scheduling for your production orders. In this case you want independent requirement quantities show on the first day of the week. Another example: since you plan production on a daily basis you want your monthly forecast spread out on a daily basis throughout the month. Distribution of planned independent requirements can help you achieve this.

In forecasting it is fair to say that most forecast models only sensibly apply to high volume materials and that for low volume materials (although specific models exist)more manual intensive forecasting practices apply. A lot of customers prefer to use historical data one on one for the future predictions: May 2008 – 120 boxes sold hence May 2009 -120 boxes sold, June 2008 – nothing sold hence June 2009 also nothing sold, and so on. In a lot of situations it is desirable to manually adjust some of the forecast values. So if you wish to use last year’s actuals as your forecast for the upcoming year you can do the following:

Sometimes a planner wishes to share the planning status of a particular material with colleagues or partners that are not SAP users. In this case it is useful to export the planning overview to Excel and perhaps pimp the lay-out with some colorful headers.To do this -from within MD04 or MD07- go to Menu > List > Variable Print.

MD04 – Variable Print

Immediately a new overview opens up that may look less attractive than the overview you are used to. On the screen ‘Print list – variable’ you can change the lay-out and save it as a variant like you are used to in standard SAP reporting.

MD04 printlist lay-out

To get the best Excel results export the report directly to an Excel table, as opposed to first store it as a local file and then open it in Excel. This way the lay-out is optimized for direct filtering and sorting.

A suitable lot-size for continuous production can be hard to come up with. Picture the situation of a mineral oils manufacturer that refines crude oil to 3 co-products. The planner wishes to control the process flow to align the production with demand (i.e. the refinery is not continuously refining at the same speed as it would in make-to-stock). Another requirement for ATP is that the production quantities are issued on a daily basis. Hence we want MRP to come up with weekly planned orders that are distributed on a daily basis. In abundance: 1 planned/process order per week, with equal quantities released per day.

Last week I spent some time finding out how to implement barcode printing in SAP. As usual I googled the internet and a couple of alternatives were flung at me: middleware, hardware vendor applications, installing fonts, etc.

Interestingly enough there is one very simple solution: using the standard barcode font that SAP standard offers for SmartForms. You wonder why there are so many alternatives while SAP already includes the easiest one. The main requirements for printing barcodes this way are:

It is not uncommon that the use of the field Maximum Stock Level in the MRP1 tab in the Material Master leads to misinterpretations. This field can only be properly used together with lot-sizing procedure HB: Replenishment up to maximum stock level. This is commonly used for tanker planning where storage is limited to the tank capacity. This lot sizing can be used in conjunction with re-order point planning or MRP. It cannot be properly used independent of lot sizing HB as a procurement ceiling (see my suggestion at the end of this post for a way to address this).

In a production environment it may not be preferable that new requirements on the short term can influence production quantities. The length of the term can be determined by the planning time fence. How MRP treats new requirements in this period can be determined using the firming type in customizing for MRP type: